Sebastião Salgado: Kuwait: A Desert on Fire

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Limited edition monograph.

In January and February 1991, as the United States–led coalition drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s army retaliated with an inferno. At some 700 oil wells they ignited vast, raging fires, sending billowing black clouds over the region and thousands of tons of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As the desperate efforts to contain and extinguish the fires progressed, Sebastião Salgado travelled to Kuwait to witness the crisis firsthand. The heat was so vicious that Salgado’s smallest lens warped. Travelling with the firefighters, Salgado captured the ravaged landscape, the charred sand and soot, the blistered remains of camels, the sand littered with cluster bombs and smoke soaring to the skies. Widely hailed as Salgado's most courageous and captivating work, the series was awarded the Oskar Barnack Award, recognising outstanding photography on the relationship between man and the environment.

This signed and limited edition is the first monograph of Salgado's work in Kuwait. In grand-scale, museum-quality reproduction, it presents more than 80 images, interlaid with transparency paper, and printed with cutting-edge High Definition Skia Photography technology. This new era of photographic printing allows, for the first time, all visible elements captured by the camera to transfer to print, achieving a new level of three-dimensionality on the page.